Abstract

Malaysia mainly produced low quality kaolin and the paper describes the development of a process to produce high purity alumina and zeolite from this mineral. Selective leaching technique was applied to remove 45% of the Al2O3 content in kaolin. The high purity alumina produced shows similar characteristic to the commercial product. An alkaline fusion stage was then carried to transform the kaolin mineral into zeolite. Identification of the crystalline phase by XRD shows that it consists of both zeolite P and hydroxysodalite. This was also confirmed by the FTIR technique.